Establish your presence with IM on your BlackBerry smartphone

As technology gives us new ways to communicate, we not only select different formats for how we reach out to friends and family, but we can also establish how we want to be contacted ourselves. So while we might choose email to pass along an invitation to an upcoming rock concert or forward our favorite barbeque sauce recipe, we’ll turn to our cell phones instead if we need to let friends know we’re running late to meet them for dinner. But what about Instant Messaging (IM)? Today people are turning to IM for everything from touching base with relatives abroad to planning a baby shower—and it’s not just for your desktop anymore, you can download the same IM program to your BlackBerry® smartphone too.

Research In Motion Product Manager Balaji Gopalan likens the choice between email and instant messaging to the difference between writing a letter and making a phone call. “It depends on the situation,” says Gopalan. “You’re not going to write a letter to say ‘meet me for lunch.’” He notes that one of the major drivers towards IM is something called “presence”, which describes the fact that IM users can alert contacts to whether they’re available for a chat. If you’re just surfing the net “past your bedtime”, you can use IM to catch your brother online and catch up with him even after the time you would normally call each other. Or you can take advantage of the fact that you can chat with more people at once to plan going out with friends or that surprise birthday party for your cousin. “What IM brings to the table is this notion of ‘presence’ where I can choose to be as available as I want to the most important people,” says Gopalan.

To get started with IM on a BlackBerry smartphone, most people just download the IM service that they’ve been using on their desktop, such as Yahoo!® Messenger, or Google® Talk™ for BlackBerry smartphones. BlackBerry smartphones also come with their own IM program that you can try out. Just like using IM on your desktop, using IM on your BlackBerry smartphone allows you to do everything from carrying on multiple conversations at once, accessing your existing IM contacts lists and adding new contacts, and sending messages in real time. Your BlackBerry smartphone will allow you to verify who is free to chat and be alerted when they come online. You can even keep chatting with others while you’re using other applications or set up notifications for your IM messages. If you want to get your friends or family on board, send them the exact link so that they can also download the IM software to chat with you. Each program will also have specialized features too, for instance, Google Talk allows you to access friends in your Gmail account and invite them to chat.

People who worry that IM will be too distracting should remember that they’re ultimately the ones in control. “If people want to reach me, they’ll ping me and I’ll say ‘I’m kind of tied up but we’ll chat back and forth,’” says Gopalan. “We’re starting to see a lot more of that happening.” Just like on your desktop IM, use your settings to let friends know exactly how available you are, which makes it easy for them to know where you’re at and when you’ll respond, allowing them to feel like you’re available while you maintain control of your schedule.

By taking advantage of people’s ability to multitask, signing on to IM allows you to be available to spend time with your family and friends even when you’re relaxing surfing the net or even away from your desk. “It’s not replacing face to face communication; it’s supplementing it. People are communicating more because they have new ways of communicating.”

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